So says New Scientist:
Once the fragments had been pieced together, the skeleton was declared to be of the species Australopithecus afarensis. But the skeleton became known as Lucy, inspired by a Beatles song that blasted out of a cassette player as the researchers celebrated their discovery that evening.
Forty years later, thanks to its age and completeness, Lucy remains an important specimen. It shows, for instance, that our distant ancestors began to walk upright on two legs long before they developed big brains.
It’s no surprise, then, that replicas of the skeleton are on display at museums across the world. But when Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently began work on a new reconstruction of Lucy’s skeleton, with help from Scott Williams at New York University, they noticed something odd. More.
For sure.
See also: What we do and don’t know about human evolution